Q&A: Company Buys Robot a Rocket Ride to the Moon

It’s impossible to know which team is leading the Google Lunar X Prize competition to land a robot on the moon. But one thing is certain: Only team Astrobotic has announced that their rocket ride is booked.

Spawned in September 2007, the GLXP is a $30 million lunar exploration competition created by the X Prize Foundation and backed with Google’s cash. It is designed to reinvigorate public interest in space exploration and seed new industries on lunar soil.

If the destination were anywhere closer than the moon, the $20 million grand prize challenge — be the first to safely land a robot, have that robot travel 500 meters and send images and data back — would be easy. But the moon is an unforgiving rock that has no atmosphere, brutal temperature swings, two-week nights and a surface buried in razor-sharp dust. It’s also 239,000 miles away.

Of the 20 or so teams publicly involved in the competition, which Google Lunar X Prize plans to finalize next week, only Astrobotic Technology has announced a contract with an aerospace company for a lunar rocket ride. Their 368-ton Falcon 9 rocket will be built by aerospace newcomer SpaceX, and it’s currently scheduled to launch some time in December 2013. It will sling Astrobotic’s planned 1,100-lb lander-and-rover combo, plus cargo and propellant, into lunar orbit.

Wired.com called Astrobotic’s president David Gump to talk money (lots and lots of money), lunar science, what it will take to reach the moon and how parading around a revered celestial body may not go over well with some folks.

Wired.com: No team except yours has said they have a ride to the moon. That’s a big deal, right?

David Gump: We’re certainly the first to announce it, but many teams are playing their hands very close to the vest. They’re not saying much. Let me put it this way: Having a contract for a Falcon 9 makes us much more credible than we were a few weeks ago. It’s a very hard thing to accomplish because of the cost. Once you have a ride, you have sort of arrived. You have a mission people can really have some confidence in.

That’s important because $24 million, the maximum you can win from the competition, isn’t enough to cover our costs. We need to sell a fair amount of space on our rocket to make the economics work, and having a contract to ride makes that so much easier.

Wired.com: What kind of total costs are we talking about here?

Gump: We’re under a non-disclosure agreement with SpaceX. But I can say their rockets cost roughly half of their competitors’. [Editor’s note: SpaceX’s pricing for a Falcon 9 launch varies from $49.9 million to $56 million.]

From when we started until we’re done with our first mission, I think a cost of $90 to $100 million is a reasonable estimate. Part of that is flexible because it’s based on how many partners provide components to us at no cost. But at the end of the mission, we hope to see a profit of at least $50 to $60 million, including the first-place prize and bonuses.

By the way, that includes media rights, too. Our rover will have a 3-D high-definition camera on it at about the height of a human, and we think one or more networks would buy exclusive rights much like they would to the Olympics. It will look be as if you’re standing on the lunar surface.

Wired.com: What bonus prizes are you going after?

Gump: That depends on which customers sign on to go to the moon with us, but we’re looking at surviving a two-week lunar night, going five kilometers instead of only 500 meters and visiting an Apollo heritage site.

Wired.com: I wanted to ask you about that. There are some folks who won’t be happy if a rover messes with a historical landing site. How do you respond to that?

‘We think it would be really cool, and so do scientists, to see what four decades of exposure has done to Apollo materials.’

Gump: Many of us grew up during Apollo, so we certainly don’t want to disgrace those sites. We think it would be really cool, and so do scientists, to see what four decades of exposure has done to Apollo materials. You can see what kind of stuff survives best in the lunar environment. Engineers call it a witness plate — a material that records environmental damage. On the moon, that’s micrometeorite bombardment, wild thermal changes, solar radiation and other punishment.

But we may in fact not go to an Apollo site because of the stunning [Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter] discoveries at the poles of frozen water, frozen methane, frozen ammonia and all sorts of things that would be very useful to start a lunar civilization. The first lunar export could be rocket propellant.

Wired.com: We’re big on science here, as you can imagine. Other than materials science, how else might researchers benefit from privatized trips to the moon?

Gump: Well, science is going to be done by NASA and ESA [The European Space Agency] and JAXA, the Japanese aerospace agency, and by the academic researchers that draw funding from those sources.

Here’s one example of science you could do: No one is able to say with certainty where the water, methane, and ammonia on the moon actually came from. Some advocate that it came from comets over 2 billion years and is averaged out. But it could be leftover from the formation of the moon four-and-a-half billion years ago, when a Mars-sized body hit the Earth before it was Earth, and left a moon-sized remnant.

Digging into the surface and running tests with a rover like ours is the best way to find out.

Wired.com: Okay, so you have a rocket scheduled and a plan to pay for it. What’s the biggest hurdle you’re facing now?

Gump: (laughs) Well, in our case, the moon needs money. Burt Rutan had great technical competence to build SpaceShipOne for the Ansari X Prize, which was an inspiration to many of us. But he couldn’t have done it without a $25 million check from Paul Allen. And that’s the same shortfall we’re looking at before we can go.

We need hedge fun owners, stray billionaires, or even deca-millionaires that can realize the lunar frontier is coming, and that we’re going to be there first making maps, doing the prospecting.

Anyway, our biggest to-do is nail down the money.

Wired.com: You’ve got less than 3 years to pull the money together. Are you worried?

Gump: You know, it’s an adventure. And going to space ain’t easy — it’s an enormous challenge. We need allies to get there, and some far-sighted customers and investors.

Here’s The Thing With Ad Blockers

We get it: Ads aren’t what you’re here for. But ads help us keep the lights on. So, add us to your ad blocker’s whitelist or pay $1 per week for an ad-free version of WIRED. Either way, you are supporting our journalism. We’d really appreciate it.